DOASKDOTELL BOOK REVIEW of StrangerAmong
Friends by David Mixner

Relevance to doaskdotell: historical view, with personal participation,
of gay-related political change

Review: David Mixner asserts, as
do I in my own writings, that we (Mr. Mixner and
President Clinton) are “children of special times.”The baby boomers would indeed grow up in
the first great era where individualism offered real private choice to the
average individual.Mixner and Clinton were born three days apart.

“But there was one difference. He could pursue his dreams
while I felt I could not. Bill Clinton was born straight and I was born gay.”

I could call that sentence a total “leftist” copout, but
indeed Mixner often provides an interesting, even
compelling narrative of his times.The
first half of his book is often harrowing, at least in several places. The
FBI actually set him up with a fake boy friend to spy on his anti-war
activities—and boy was he traumatized when he found out.(I actually thought that Hoover’s
henchmen really didn’t go after “ordinary people,” but I must have been
wrong.)He and his lover would later
be denied a joint business loan.He
would have to deal with his family.

He gradually becomes a political operative and part of the
inner circle, by the time of the Clinton Administration.He becomes a “professional” in the
political scene, while I did not (a more crucial difference).And one wonders how important it is to
belong to the establishment to become a person of influence.I have wanted to test the waters (as had
Bill Gates once), that one need not.For his account of the gays-in-the-military debate late in the book
seems a bit insipid.Indeed, it
reached a point of lockout, where the administration wouldn’t talk to him
anymore.Conventional adversarialism would not always work even in the halls of
the Clinton administration,
whatever (to recall The American Spectator) “his cheatin’
heart.”